Later, after Ian Fleming's death, Amis was commissioned as the first continuation novelist for the James Bond novel series, writing Colonel Sun (1968) under the pseudonym Robert Markham.

Written at the Bond-mania's zenith in the 1960s, The James Bond Dossier is the first, thorough, albeit tongue-in-cheek, literary analysis of Ian Fleming's strengths and weaknesses as a thriller-writer.

Despite his intellectual respect for the Fleming canon, Amis's way of writing about it, according to his biographer Zachary Leader, ' ... partly guys academic procedures and pretensions by applying them to low-cultural objects' and, as such, is deliberately provocative.

[2] In that context, the Dossier can ' ... look like a cheeky two-fingered salute to the academic world, a farewell raspberry blown at all things pedantically donnish, in a manner Lucky Jim would surely have approved.

In one hundred and sixty pages, The James Bond Dossier methodically catalogues and analyses the activities and minutiae of secret agent 007: the number of men he kills, the women he loves, the villains he thwarts, and the essential background of Ian Fleming's Cold War world of the 1950s.

[6] After Fleming's death in August 1964, Glidrose Productions Ltd., owners of the international book rights, asked for Amis's editorial assessment of the uncompleted manuscript of The Man with the Golden Gun, which Jonathan Cape deemed feeble, and perhaps unpublishable.

Kingsley Amis's argument is that the Bond novels are substantial and complex works of fiction, and certainly not, as Ian Fleming's critics said, 'a systematic onslaught on everything decent and sensible in modern life'.

[11] Although written in Amis's usual accessible, light-hearted style, The James Bond Dossier is neither patronising nor ironic – it is a detailed literary criticism of the Ian Fleming canon.

According to his first biographer, Eric Jacobs,[13] the hand of sovietologist and scholar Robert Conquest is betrayed in Amis's precise dissertation upon the genesis and changing nomenclatures of SMERSH, the employer of the villains of the early novels.